Small Business Talk

The Podcast to Grow your Business Faster

Focusing on the Human Aspect of Your Business to Make Your Business Better with Dr. Bruno Roque Cignacco

Show Notes

Background

Dr. Bruno Roque Cignacco (PHD) is an international business consultant, international speakers and business coach. For over 20 years, he has advised and trained hundreds of companies on international trade activities and international marketing. He is a Senior fellow of the Higher Education Academy (HEA – UK) and the author of the business and personal development books published in different languages.

His new book “The Art of Compassionate Business: Main Principles for the Human-Orientated Enterprise” (2019, Routledge) challenges the reader to change the way they perform in business situations and become more focused on the human aspects of business activities. The users of this knowledge and those affected by them will undergo a profound transformation in the way they perform business activities. They will benefit from gradually testing and implementing the guidelines conveyed in this book, both in the business environment and the workplace. When readers put these principles into practice, positive ripple effects are bound to affect other stakeholders of the organisation they work for or own.

Have a Meaningful Mission

For companies to develop a good mission, a good purpose, it needs to be meaningful and not only focus only on profits. A business should focus on bringing about positive change in the environment, creating positive impact on the world. For example, including an aspect of environmentally friendliness. The mission should include satisfying the needs of different stakeholders such as customers, suppliers, the community, the planet as a whole, so it’s win-win for everyone involved and includes activities that bring about positive change.

Positive change attracts talented people

A business with a good mission and a focus on positive change tends to attract talented people. Why? People want to feel inspired, employees feel much more motivated and customers feel attracted to a company. For example, if you have to buy a product and company A is caring for the environment and company B does not care for the environment, if both companies product is similar and the same price, customers are more prone to choose the product from the company that is environmentally friendly.

Focus on the Human Side of Business

An especially important aspect of business is the qualitative aspects such as compassion, empathy, support, care, and love. Love not only relates to close relationships such as friends, partner or family, but much more humanistic perspectives of love too including compassion, generosity, gratitude, care, support. These can be applied to business and non-business relationships.

Develop Long Term Business Relationships

In business, you aren’t only dealing with business partners, employees and suppliers, you’re dealing with individuals with a legitimate need to be satisfied. All agreements that you develop in a business environment should be meeting these needs, meaning relationships should be long-term oriented.

Business is about relationships and the building bricks of business is people. When a company develops more loving, more compassion and more supportive relationship with these stakeholders, these key performance indicators tend to improve naturally. Why? Because they’re the result of the interaction between a company and its stakeholders.